Belgium - Monuments of War, Sites of Peace : European
Archaeological Heritage
Vast numbers of English and French soldiers who died from disease
and poison gas are buried in beautifully kept cemeteries around
Ypres. These cemeteries are actively maintained by English families
and the relatives of the dead as living memorials. The German
cemeteries
which hold equally large numbers of dead are unkempt and rarely
visited. Summer 2005
July 11 - 30
Dr. Mark Leone,
University of Maryland
Dr. Frank McManamon,
U.S. National Park Service
Dr. Ann Killebrew,
Penn State University
Mr. Neil Silberman,
Ename Center
Guest Lecturers from Belgium
Registration for this course is through the Study
Abroad Office. For complete registration details, costs, etc.,
follow
this link to
Study Abroad-Belgium.
The new Europe celebrates heritage as a way to unify itself and
to capitalize on its physical attractiveness to visitors. We will
visit important sites of European heritage which have been discovered
through archaeological excavations. We will see the archaeology
behind some of Europe's most important tourist attractions.
See student
comments from Summer 2005 !
After landing in Brussels, we will pass through the Brussels airport
and take a bus to one of the best preserved small cities in Belgium.
This small city is Oudenaarde. We will operate out of this medieval
city and will visit its famous Belgian Gothic city hall and vast
parish church.
The first week of our stay in Belgium and Northern France will
be at an archaeological excavation in a small town outside Oudenarda,
called Ename. We will dig in a ruined abbey first established around
AD 950. The abbey was destroyed during the French Revolution,
but has left a wonderful ruin. We will spend five days working as
archaeologists to recover parts of the kitchen of
the abbey.
Our class visits the famous Mannequin Pis in the middle of Brussels.
The capital of Europe offers good food, lots of people viewing,
and a view of the buildings of the European Union. Attached to the abbey is a digital interpretation of the ruins
featuring one of the most up-to-date and exciting digital reconstructions
of a ruin in Europe. The phases available in the reconstruction
show one of the most modern ways that archaeology is used in Europe
to explain an area's heritage. Ename holds one of Europe's
celebrated centers for cultural interpretation founded by the government
of East Flanders and funded by the European Union. The Ename Center
for Heritage Interpretation will be our home for much of our stay
in Belgium and Northern France.
During the first week we will visit Brussels and will see the Grand
Place, the famous fountain called the Mannequin Pis, and the headquarters
of the European Union. We will spend half a day at the Africa Museum,
established by King Leopold for the ethnographic treasures he took
from the Congo. This is an unreformed colonial and imperialist museum,
one of the few such intellectual antiques left in all of Europe.
We will receive lectures about the colonialist interpretation of
Africa and listen to the museum's extensive efforts to put
in place a more appropriate set of interpretations.
The European landscape is made up of formal gardens, planned hillsides
that look "natural," canals, and battlefields. During the course
we will look at many examples of urban planning and planned
landscapes. The museum is set in the midst of one of the largest planned landscapes
in Europe. We will spend part of our day understanding this environment.
During the first week we will also visit the cemeteries around
Ypres, the reconstructed town, and the famous Menin Gate, where
a bugle sounds each evening in memory of the 800,000 men who died
in this place during World War I. There is nothing like these experiences
to show the results of the devastation that occurred in World War
I.
Ypres features the reconstructed medieval Cloth Hall which was
destroyed during the battles. The Allies stopped the Germans from
invading all the rest of Western Europe at Ypres. During three years of
stalemate, the town was destroyed, including its most famous monument.
The Cloth Hall, now rebuilt, houses a War Museum which shows, in
an emotionally powerful way, the character of trench warfare and
the effects of poison gases on soldiers during the Great War. The
exhibits are so effective no one is left doubting what World War
I was like or why over 800,000 men died in this location. The visit
to Ypres is a riveting experience. Outside the town, ongoing archaeological
excavations continue to find the remains of soldiers from the Great
War.
Students will see Europe's oldest, longest, and most important
historical woven text. The tapestry commemorates the battle of
Hastings and the Norman conquest of Britain. It makes a startling
counterpoint to
the cemetary in Ypres and the American cemetary at Omaha Beach,
where Britons and their American decendents liberated Europe
in the 20th century. Week 2:
The class will go by bus to Normandy in Northern France
where we will explore heritage presentation from both the distant
and recent past. The two great cathedrals at Amiens, and Rouen
are among the biggest and most successful gothic churches ever built
in the Middle Ages. At Rouen we will see the modern church built
over the site where Jean d'Arc was executed.
Next we visit Bayeux and will see the famous tapestry that depicts
the story of William the Conqueror's successful invasion of
England in 1066.
We have just celebrated the sixtieth anniversary of the Normandy
invasions which led to victory in Europe during World War II.
We will travel to those beaches and see Omaha Beach, then visit
the nearby American cemetery whose design demonstrates important
principles of the preservation of memory. These are the locales
visited by American and European leaders in June 2004 during the
anniversary celebrations.
We will not be just tourists at this famous monastery and
town. We will attempt to understand that it was secularized during
the
French revolution and then made into a modern heritage center
during
the last two centuries. Even a new generation of Benedictine monks
was re-installed for autenticity. Our job at Mont St. Michel will
be to pentrate the appearance of timelessness and to understand
the
relationship
between the built past and our modern understandings of it.
Mont St. Michel as seen from the coast of France. Our last stop in Northern France is Mont St. Michel. The differences
between this romanesque church and the later gothic style of the
great cathedrals of Amiens and Rouen can be observed first hand.
This is probably Europe's most famous monastery town
and we will spend part of a day there.
Week 3
We return to Belgium for our
third and final week. We will go to Bruges and will live in a delightful
hotel on one of the city's many canals. While we are in Bruges
we will have lectures on urban planning, which will explain how
archaeology and historical documents were used to design parts of
the town to accommodate the many millions of tourists it attracts
annually.
Walking around in Bruges with the class or in the evening on your own with
a good map allows you to see the harmonious appearance of a city where planning
forbids any change that interferes with its homogenous look. The city is one
of the most perfect in Europe and as you walk around, you will be able to ask
questions about how it was made to appear this way. Come see how a timeless
survival was created by urban planners and heritage professionals. Bruges is a famous small late medieval city with delightful monuments,
churches, and museums. It features wonderful food, like the
rest of Belgium and Northern France. We will visit archaeological
locations and see how underground garages, a vast new port, which
is the 8th busiest in Europe, and new hotels were installed to both
protect the town and provide it with a modern economy.
During all of these visits, local experts will show and describe
how archaeological excavations and careful urban planning combined
to protect historic environments and allow tourists to visit safely.
In all of our experiences, we will see how current interpretations
reflect local and national European needs.
The purpose of the course is to show American students that heritage
can act to celebrate local success and generate intelligent educational
opportunities simultaneously. Our experience in this course will
allow students to look at American historical environments differently.
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Throughout Europe and particularly in
Belgium, there are publically supported houses for the poor who cannot
support themselves. Bruges is filled with
bequests of the rich for the impoverished in the form of these many cottages
put up by people to memorialize themselves while rendering service to
the poor.
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Bruges has maintained its built heritage of widows' houses, alms' houses,
and institutions for people at the lowest end of the economic spectrum. Such
buildings
look natural within a planned historic fabric. It is important for American
students to see these because they are systematically destroyed in most American
heritage
settings. Here we see the relationship between philanthropy
and poverty in a more productive way.
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Registration for this course is through the Study
Abroad Office. For complete registration details, costs, etc.,
follow this link to
Study Abroad-Belgium.
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